Ladies and Gentlemen, children of all ages, please let me entertain you for the next few moments.
Welcome to the 1st Annual Striped-Bass No Net Open/NNO.
The rules are there can be no nets on board the boat and fishing must be done at night, we forgot the net this night, oops.
The No Net Open was a successful night for these two fishermen. The evening started out well enough. The water was turbid. Kicked up by the strong southwest wind, typical on a warm summers day, so we had to jog south, running the long, 3-4 mile long irregularly shaped ripline in the early evening sun, now a very pleasant orange-sherbet color to the west, when lo and behold, birds, Terns, lots of terns, concentrated on a ball of fish maybe 30 yards in diameter, breaking fish, birds putting themselves right in the water willy-nilly. We watch for maybe a minute, paying attention to current and wind and I put us in line so we'll drift through the calamity. As soon as our hard-plastic swimming lures touch the water we are TIGHT! The blues are thick and all around us. With the motor off we are just another thing in the water to the fish. We spend a good 45minutes to an hour catching and releasing the smallish blues, 2-4 pounders, look northwest, into the setting sun which is getting bigger and bigger as it nears the horizon and decide it is time to make our run for the water we'll fish in tonight.
The sun is getting low on the horizon and with the haze of a typical hot day on the land, the sun is now a brilliant pinkish/electric orange, slowly making its way under the land, and we are happy because it is time to set up our drifts for the night. Of course, I particularly like this part of the day the best, there are almost NO boats on the water at this time and once darkness there are NO, I mean NO boats on the water, and for some reason, there are never are, any boats out at night. I ask, "Why is that?"
I can only hypothesize and take comfort in the fact that the dark keeps the eternal "Riff-Raff" off the water, much in the same way I'm glad that more of the general population does NOT snowmobile, selfish as I may be, the more trails and water I can have to myself the better, however, as self centered as that might seem, I take comfort in the fact that I'm not going to get anyone to just start snowmobiling just like I'm not getting any boaters/fishermen to go out at night if they don't want to, but no matter, only the hardcore go out at night.
There is nothing on any of the shorelines for as far as the eye can see. No lights, no nothing, it is eerie in a way, but still nice knowing that we are getting in no ones way and no one is getting in ours.
Through time, I've been able to scout out the waters I'll be plying this night. While the shorelines are completely boulder strewn, what is visible above on the beach is also the same way under the water, is is why one can not just go right up tight to the shoreline, set up drift and cast, it can be done however keeping the motor tilted up and out of the water can save the day and in the later pictures you will see in the majority of the shots, the motor is indeed tilted up all the way out of the water.
On this night, the entire shorline was HOT, and I mean HOT. Let me flash back to all my past seasons in the area and share with you what I have seen and continue to see. Bass, all shapes and sizes, just lolling about in the water, anywhere from 5-20 feet away from the shoreline in anywhere from 4-20 feet of water. On these days, just like others have experienced, the fish will take nothing, they might follow, they might nip, but they won't eat. The waters this night were as fish-ridden as the days were, the main difference being, it is night.
So at the shorlines, I'd set up our drifts according to where I knew where the danger areas lay and kept away as appropriate. The various crags, boulder piles and more open coves were just giving it up. Moonrise was not until 10:45pm and the Astro-Tables/Lunar Chart thingamajigy that my buddy was telling me about had said that the rating for this particular night was a 44 out of a 100.
I'm no tide/flow/moon expert, and I'll never even concern myself with any of it, probably because I'm primarily a boat fisherman and I'll go out when I can and despite my years of fishing, I've still never targeted a place based on the tide, all I know is night is night, and for striped bass, night time is the right time. I do believe that on this night, the tide was on its way up and admittedly, the fishing to begin was slow, in the first 2-2 1/2 hours we managed a 34".
My buddy, whom I will refer to X, as in Fisher-X, had hooked 2 good fish, both of which took him into the stones and broke him off. His poor line would come back in shreds, the 19.5 lb test in a 14 lb diameter was just rubbed raw from the fish having taken him around a barnacle encrusted rock and just pinging his line. The first fish he lost was a good one too, a heavy pull and unwilling to give up any ground, it ran him right to the shorline and broke him, the same thing happened to his second fish. He was fishing a Boca, 7' Medium/Heavy with a Shimano SM reel which was all new to him.
He had started fishing with a 9" Sluggo, no weight as the wind was light and with the wind at our backs, it really helped us with putting our offerings in the water. He had been employing his twitching by gently jerking his rod tip up a couple of times then letting his black worm flutter down and usually right before he would lift his tip up he would feel the take then set back and be on. As the third time is usually the charm, he was determined not to let this 3rd fish "stone" him and he drew back, pointed his rod tip away from the rockline and steered the fish away to clear water, the run was on.
Now let me remind the good readers that this was the 1st Annual No Net Open, that is, we forgot the landing net at home, however, despite this very minor setback, we did intend on releasing everything save for a fish that we'd like to keep for food. All truth be told, I don't even really like eating fish, I just like catching them and getting and showing friends and family how to do it and for them to catch their own. I pretend I'm the charterboat Captain and do my thing. All day long I tied leaders, spooled line, and got everything in order for the night mission and it paid off with this night. Everything but the net, so the No Net Open was born. We had to lip every fish in order to get it into the boat, however, the vast majority were left in the water, hook pulled and let go, to swim the water again. In the rare instances that a hook was troublesome, much care was taken to get the fish into the boat, hook removed then gently released. So the first keeper was aboard.
We stopped after the bluefish excursion and took some time to get us some scup for the baitwell. Using the same rigs for the eels, that is, a solid ring B/B swivel to 30lb floro to a 5/0-6/0 Gama hook, we'd sling the fish just as we would an eel, and boy, what a time, like shiners in a freshwater bass pond/lake. I had wondered for a while whether or not hook color mattered at night. For some time I believed that black was good and that red was good however after this past night, I now know that forevermore, even a gold hook with flecks of red left over and more to the point, rubbed off from hooking fish will catch fish, even large.
I had swung out a live one into the stone cradles which I knew well and in the past have been able to drift past both at high and low tide with clear sun and clear water so I knew the exact layout of this bass crib, this mini cove complete with large stones to form a sort of walled city for bass at night. My bait wiggled in the water, left and right then settled down and I set to reeling it in slowly, much like we do with eels when I got the take. It was after 12am and while X was getting all sorts of takes and getting broken off on rocks and landing fish, I had set to ensure the boat stayed off the shore lest we look like the S.S. Minnow, stranded on rock beach. When I got my take, I knew I was on. The fish did go right to the shore, I envisioned that if it kept the rate it was running, it would have swam itself right up onto the bowling ball rocks that paved the beach, it would have looked like those salmon in Alaska that swim right onto the sand bars on the riverbanks trying to get away from the Kodiak/whatever the names are, bears. I knew my rod, my 7' Medium Boca with my Boca PT40 spooled up with 15lb clear Trilene big game and with the rod at full bend, and for the whole fight was fully bent, stretched my rod and line out and swept the fish out to open water where after I was sure I was going to pressure the line into breaking I was able to loosen the drag and let the fish run when it wanted to. Prior to my getting the fish out of the rocks, I could not get the fish to turn, like many bass do when first hooked, it sat motionless, perpendicular to my rod/line, using its substantial heft to its advantage and just holding its ground. After all, when its pectoral fins are the size of my palms, all the fish had to do was spread out all its fins and hold steady and it would not move. I had to cup the spool to get the fish's head turned then when I had it moving in a favorable direction, the drag began to scream, and scream it did. The scream did not resemble a 35-38 inch bluefish which run hard and fast but for a relatively short distance, this one started off fast, then got faster, then kept going and going and going, making its way towards the moonlight which by now was very bright and illuminating the entire shorline for miles, casting shadows and making the line visible above the water, it was a thing of beauty. This fish took me a good 40 minutes to get in as the 1.2-1.4 mph drift coupled with the sheer size and weight of the fish took some time. I could only manage 3 turns of the handle on every drop and rise of the rod, it was like pulling a side hooked fish through the water. Now as this was the no net classic, the next pic shows me with holding my rod about 3/4 of the way from the top, making sure there was always scope or 4-5 feet of line at the rod tip to the fish, being sure to use the shock absorbing quality of the soft rod tip just in case the fish decided to run again, which it did 4-5 times when it could see the boat or the light from our LED headlamps. I always instruct everyone who fishes with me to never reel in the fish close to the rod tip as that reduction in scope is tantamount to an anchored boat with no scope, the anchor just isn't going to hold and in conjunction with no absorber for the fishes pull and the drag more times than not too tight, a fish of 40+ inches will ping 15lb test as easy as we can break 2lb test with our bare hands. Here is me hanging over the side going for the lip of this early to mid 40's, better than early to mid 30's lb fish. Like I said earlier and will maintain, this was the 1st Annual No Net Open, we left most of the fish in the water, we had to lip them, for the most part didn't even take the fish out of the water, got the hook out, took a pretty picture of the fish in the water and let it go.
Here is that same fish from another perspective. This is one of my favorite shots because of the amount of fish that cannot be seen, however, the slab of the fish that can be seen is pretty good size if not great. The fish is right next to the boat and was really coming too since I had been sloshing it back and forth and making sure it was alive since I didn't want a fish that size to do the death spiral in the dark, it would have been a shame, but that was not the case. The size of the fish in the water is just ridiculous and this was the biggest fish I had ever got tight on and brought to the boat.
X had his next fish on an eel. We didn't bring that many eels, we had 6 between us as we had scup and all of our lures, he loves topwater so he scratched up this almost 40", high 20's-low 30's fish. Big, black popper, just twitched ever so slowly in the ink black/silver streaked water that had a light chop to it so it was not night-glass when it was pounced upon by this fish. It had to come into the boat as the treble hooks in the lure were too much to extricate while in the water, however the No Net Open rules were still being adhered to as there was no net in the boat.
My next fish came later in the night. After 2am. We had been getting tight to fish on every drift, in every way. Eels, scup, topwater/black poppers, large, I mean large, dark plastic/wood swimmers, we had things going into the water on all cylinders, everything was firing. I had one limp, eyes bugged out and hanging from the sockets-dead eel. 'Eeew' one might think, however the vast majority of S-B'ers being hardcore fishermen, know what eels with eyes hanging out of their sockets look like. By this time of the night, we had been going back and forth across my favorite stretch of underwater real estate. By now the moon was full overhead and lighting everything up so very nicely. I put the boat on course for the drift, cut engine and tilt the motor full up. Earlier in the night we had bumped some big boulders however with the amount of slime and vegetation on them and from being worn away from the eons of water passing over them, in all the bumps my boat has taken, the gelcoat is hardly scratched and maybe the bottom paint goes away but the old girls hull is tough and relatively flat so when I do hang up for a moment, the next swell slides me off relatively drama-free, thank goodness for a shallow draft.
I had this eel on earlier in the night and in the following pic of the fish and rod and reel on deck, one might be able to see the teeth marks from the earlier fish that it had caught, you might even be able to see my bloody, rubbed raw, striper thumb/palm/hand, all souvenier-remnants of the 1st Annual No Net Open. I must add that once the fish get into the mid 30"'s and higher, the small teeth get bigger and the web of my hand between my thumb and finger looks like I took 30 grit sandpaper to it, one can see in the pics my poor hands, then again, what kind of pu$$y am I to complain about having to hoist too many bass to the boat to take the hook out and let go???
While I do like fresh-wiggly eels in some conditions, I do like fresh-dead eels because when there is a take, it is a sure take, much like fishing slug-go's, that slug-go ain't coming to life and swimming away, when the fish is on, it is on, and that is what happened next. This fish just fought, plain and simple. The hook on this one was in the top of its mouth so unlike the other fish who get hooked so nicely in the corner of the mouth or on the front of the jaw, I had to hoist this 40-incher, some 30+lbs against the gunwale to extricate my hook and him/her back in. Of course, my staff photographer/adoring paparazzi had to take the shot first, then back in the drinkie-poo. You will like the nasty-hands, the always in fashion headlamp, the ever present lifejacket just in case one of these beasts wants to rear back and pull me into the juice, and the combination whistle/compass/thermometer on my zipper pull, sometimes, in the fog, at night, noise can be our best friend, then the bluefish blood from earlier in the evening, for the most part fishing can be messy.
Here is the topshot of that fish going back home. All in all, it was a great night, got back to the docks at around 3:40am and was shot for the next two days/nights. Something about being on the boat at night that is more exhausting than anything else out there. The massive decrease in sight, the constant pitching of the boat coupled with having to focus on a lightspot in the night to engage in a manually-challenging task is tough, like someone who cannot read in a car being forced to do so for a 6-7 hour stretch, however, I do it for love. Don't hate the fisherman, hate the fishing. Enjoy all!
bassy....
Beer is the reason we get up each afternoon.
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